Say goodbye to dating book

I don’t know what it thinks such a move would accomplish, but I do know what the proper response is to a girlfriend, or colleague, who tries that approach: You hold the door open for them and let it hit them in the ass on the way out.

The way my life has been going lately, I’m seriously considering selecting a random TTAC reader to be the executor of my modest estate and then taking a shot at BASE-jumping off the Petronas Towers.

If that reader happens to be you, then I need you to do at least this one thing.

Have Wal-Mart or whomever the lowest bidder happens to be engrave the following on my headstone: “He saw passive aggression and, wherever possible, met it with actual aggression.” I’m old enough to remember when women were passive-aggressive and men were just plain mean, instead of the other way ’round. The other night I was at dinner and my date asked for coffee and the swishy waiter pouted, “We can do it, if you want to wait fifteen minutes.” I’d rather he said, “Go to hell. Even in 2016, however, it’s rare for an entire company to be passive-aggressive.

But that’s exactly what Volkswagen is doing: threatening to abandon the mass market in the United States, presumably because its current exposure to lawsuits and government penalties is too high and its showroom traffic isn’t exactly at Beetles-in-the-Summer-Of-Love levels.

That doesn’t mean that I can turn a blind eye to VW’s continued and uninterrupted reign of incompetent terror in this country since the beginning of the water-cooled era.

For the last 40 years, Volkswagen has viewed its American customers with open contempt and it’s never hesitated to make us aware of that fact.

The thousand injuries of Wolfsburg I have borne as I best could: from poky square-headlight Westmoreland GTIs to the eight-valve, quad-lamp Mk2 “GTI”, to the interiors of the Tennessee Passat — the list goes on.

To be an American VW fan is to resign one’s self to the certain knowledge that the good stuff is never going to come your way.

Once a decade or so the company will grudgingly let a few Corrado VR6es or something like that onto a Jersey-bound boat, but in general the American showrooms have been Plato’s cave writ large in banal yellow-and-stainless-steel decor, showing us vague shadows of European product and expecting us to pay top dollar for the privilege of taking the cast-offs.